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I have had an idea rolling around in my head for a couple of months now. Today, it finally all gelled together!

One of the things that drives me nuts is that when I want to do a picture in Second Life, I always have to scroll through the windlight settings to find something that I think looks good. That takes FOREVER!

On top of that, I am a very visual person, so I have to SEE what the settings look like. Which I know is kinda redundant, but the process is laborious, and painstaking.

I have been trying to figure out a way to make a catalog, or a gallery of pictures showing what different windlight settings look like. I have been mulling around how I would sort them. Would I have them inworld? on my computer? all these little details.

It's a blog where people can post their Second Life pictures, and all the information about how they created that picture. Information would include locations, windlight settings, graphics details, and any other information they would like to share with people.

I hope to have a picture on there of all the different windlight settings at some point, and I am going to strive to label things in a way that people can find a specific setting easily.

If you have a pictures you would like to share, please check out the site to see how to submit it.

If you have a blog of your own, please consider adding it to your blog roll.

I will be adding sites to it myself as soon as possible.

Please let me know what you think of this! If you have suggestions about improving the site, please let me know that also!

I have blogged about how great i thought the idea of open sourcing the viewer code was. I still hold that position, because people have been working on the viewer for a bit now, and there are some versions available now that have some really cool features.

Putting aside the security issues of having an open source viewer, there is something that I have not seen done yet, and I am not exactly sure why.

While there have been many changes to the User Interface, and things to make your experience easier, I wonder why there has not been much, if anything done about the raw speed of the viewer.

Here are a few things I notice when running Second Life:

I am at my home, and everything is fully rezzed. I tp over to a store, or to a friends place. I am there for say 20 minutes. Then I tp home. Why does everything have to rerez? I watch my computer, and its not loading these images from my hard drive, cause my hard drive is not being accessed. It seems to be downloading all these images all over again. Um...why? Isn't that the point of having a cache?

Lets talk about going to a store for a moment. I tp in, and usually set my draw distance down to like 64 meters (there is a chat command that does this in the Emerald Viewer, its called DD. It is very handy). I sit there and watch the rezzing process. I look at my frame rate, and the bandwidth being used by the client. While I admit my video card does not have the best frame rate in the world, but why is my bandwidth only at 50 kbps, when my internet connection is at least 10mbs? I do a ping test, and a ping plot, to see if there is anything that might be having trouble, and it all tests out with PLENTY of speed.

I know there many questions inside all of that, but my big question is...are the caching and networking routines that complicated? I know from my own programming experience that changing around an interface, and even just making an interface for a given feature is not all that hard. This is not to diminish the work that people ARE doing on the viewer, because they have done some awesome work! I am just wondering why nobody has done much work on these basic issues.

Can you imagine, if somebody came out with a viewer that had a significant speed increase for everybody? Talk about improving the user experience!

To be fair, I am in the process, slowly, of downloading the source code, and all the tools required to compile this code myself. I can only hope that I can decipher enough of it to see if there might be something that can be done about this without too much pain.

Even if I cannot figure that part out, I am still very interested to see if I CAN get it to compile! How cool would it be to have Al's Viewer! Maybe I can take all the features that I like, and put them into a viewer, just for me.

If there is anybody out there, who would be willing to help me decipher the caching and networking code for the viewer, please contact me. I am seriously wondering if its just been overlooked because nobody thinks they can understand it!